FOREST - It would be unfair to say that Gov. Haley Barbour is trying to balance the state budget on the backs of Mississippi's poor and old populations, but the realities of his budget proposals would point to such a fate - intended or not.
First, Gov. Haley Barbour, along with support from both parties in the Legislature, sought to remove the thousands of recipients known as Poverty-Level, Aged or Disabled from the Medicaid rolls. This saga is still playing out.
So is the saga over education funding. Barbour's budget would underfund the Mississippi Adequate Education Program (MAEP), what most people consider to be the cornerstone of state education.
In both scenarios, the refrains are the same. Barbour and Senate Republicans insist that the needs of the people can be met through spending cuts alone. House Democrats and some of their counterparts in the Senate would prefer a more balanced approach of revenue increases mixed with spending cuts.
The argument against Barbour's plan of "no new taxes" is that if the state does not pass a tax increase, then local governments will be forced to raise their millage to fund education. This same argument was made last year, and Barbour maintains that few districts raised taxes because of an education fund shortage, despite the hundreds of teaching positions that were eliminated in order to avoid the tax increases at the county levels.
Barbour has further said that Democratic claims of county-imposed tax increases are nothing more than scare tactics, that proponents of a tax increase cannot provide proof-positive that local governments cannot absorb spending cuts.
Then comes the Mississippi Department of Education, which last month presented legislators with a list of school districts that would most likely have to raise taxes if MAEP were not fully funded.
The MDE list included 11 county districts and 12 municipal districts. If you want a clear picture of who will be taxed under Barbour's plan of not fully funding MAEP, just take a look at Census data.
Census data for individual cities is not as easy to come by as is county data, so for the purpose of this exercise, we'll focus on the 11 counties.
As a point of reference, Mississippi's estimated population in 2003 was 2.88 million people. Of that, 12.1 percent, or 343,853, were 65 years of age or older, and 19.9 percent, or 548,079 people, lived below the poverty level. Mississippi's per capita income is $15,853.
The 11 counties - Amite, Calhoun, Copiah, Franklin, Jefferson Davis, Jones, Kemper, Marion, Prentiss, Simpson and Sunflower - represent 9 percent of the state's population. They represent 10.6 percent of the state's 65-years-or-older population. They represent 10.7 percent of the state's population that lives in poverty. The average per capita income of these 11 counties is $13,193.
Only three of these 11 counties has a poverty level below the state's 19.9 percent level: Calhoun County at 18.1 percent, Jones County at 19.8 percent and Prentiss County at 16.5 percent.
Of these 11 counties facing possible tax increases, only one has an elderly population that is lower than the state's 12.1 percent. That would be Sunflower County, with 9.7 percent, or 3,333 persons.
And none of these counties - count them, none - has a higher per capita income than the state average. The lowest would be Sunflower County, again, with an average per capita income of $11,365.
When you consider that these 11 counties make up only about 50 percent of the population that will be affected by local tax increases if the state refuses to find more meaningful revenue, then the idea of "no new taxes" becomes even more absurd.
In the end, this session will probably include fee increases, a tobacco-tax increase and deep, deep cuts. And next year, we'll fight about taxes again, even if the state passes the buck and some get taxed this year anyway.
